“You’ll see a turn for the better as soon as the first flurry is over, Federico! Only, for God’s sake, don’t pay any attention to whatever Fontenoy’s parasites advise you to do, for they’re in a panic!”
As soon as Robledo got up the next day he sent for the newspapers. One glance at their headlines showed him only too plainly that Fontenoy’s suicide was assuming the proportions of a public scandal. It was intimated that several persons well known in society were threatened with arrest within forty-eight hours, and in one of the papers he thought he discerned allusions to Torre, in a somewhat vague sentence about a certain engineer, “reputed to be a protégé of the banker’s.”
When he returned to his friend’s he found the Marquis nervously scanning the newspapers in the library.
“They want to put me in jail,” said the latter dolefully. He looked old and broken, but curiously resigned.
“And yet I never hurt anyone,” he went on. “I can’t understand why they come after me.”
Robledo tried to cheer him up a bit but without success.
“And see what it’s done to me! I never in my life feared a living soul, and now I can’t stand having anyone look at me! Even when the butler speaks to me I have to look away.... Heaven only knows what they’re saying about me in the servants’ quarters!”
As though he had shrunk back from the painful present to his childhood, he added timidly and with pathetic humility,
“I’m afraid to go out. I’m afraid of seeing all those people I’ve met so often in this drawing-room and that, because if I met them I’d have to stop and explain what I’ve done—and then they would look at me sceptically, or worse than that, they would say they were sorry for me, without meaning it!”
He stopped, and after a pause, he exclaimed,